A time crystal that beats to the rhythm of both order and chaos has revealed a new way in which matter can keep time.

New experiments have demonstrated the time rondeau crystal – a time crystal that repeats in time but never quite in the same way. The result is chaos in the short-term, but on longer timescales, order emerges.

"In this work, we reveal the existence of new types of temporal order, arising from non-periodic but structured drives," writes a team of physicists led by Leo Joon Il Moon of the University of California, Berkeley, and Paul Schindler of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany.

"Our experiments show that breaking the periodicity of the drive can lead to new exotic forms of partial temporal order."

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